Thank you all so much

Just wanted to say to everyone how much I have appreciated being in this class with you. I have learned so much from all of your different projects and presentations. Even when the content seems far removed from my situation, there are nuggets of ideas that apply to me or serve as reminders or inspiration about how much great work you all are doing.

I am glad the class is finished, esp. since it was the last step in my degree, but I look forward to returning to the Ning and the wiki to steal all your good stuff.

I hope to see you back here as well.

Enjoy your last few minutes before the 2009-2010 race begins.

History of the Internet

I loved the way this article was a conglomeration of print and audio. I enjoyed listening to the speakers in their own voices. I love the variety of points of view. I could see the global idea (and if I had been unaware, the repeated chapter lists would have reminded me!)

However, I did find it choppy in some ways. Even with the italicized transitions, I sometimes felt the authors/compilers did not finish talking about one idea before the author went into the next one.

Some other points of interest:

1. The involvement/interaction of government and political issues with the development and use of the technology – need for reliable communication and also way of preventing war – communication.

2. As someone else said, I always wondered where the name Internet came from and how Al Gore could state that he invented it.

3. “Everything else—commerce and entertainment and financial services—was secondary. We thought community trumped content.” – While this comment was about times prior to Facebook, doesn’t it also seem to fit with the evolution we are currently seeing for the common, non-scientific web-surfing populace.

4. "I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding." This just struck me as funny.

Digital Trail – Hard to be invisible these days

1. Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology.

Rather scary to imagine. Does make the Big Brother allusion fitting.

2. Google and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.

At least that was true until all the advertising became a part of Google and we had to start wading through “sponsored” links, etc. It seems to be better now, except that Bing now invades my space when it is sometimes unwanted, a tendency I’ve also found with other tool bar search boxes.

3. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.

Tell it to Erin Andrews or any of the other celebrities who have their images, etc., splashed all over. Yes, they have in some ways put themselves out there, but we choose to put ourselves out there in ways as well. There is a common saying in our teachers’ lounge about “weighing your public utterances.” A word to the wise…

4. “Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.” From MIT researcher

Not quite sure what to make of that. I like privacy. It’s not necessarily a big part of my life in a small town, but it is important to me. Old-fashioned values I guess.

Digital Intimacy – Concepts I found interesting

1. When they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

While I don’t Twitter with my friends, I do find that Facebook does serve the same purpose. You see someone, and you can immediately ask a relevant question. I definitely get to know more on FB than I would otherwise, and for some of my relationships, that’s a huge step up. Since I don’t have a huge number of friends on FB, they tend to be more than just “‘weak ties’ – loose acquaintances, people [I know] less well.”

2. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

I suppose that’s true. Each advancement in technology does allow me to be closer to my family, all of whom live at least a state away.

3. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some.

While that may be theoretically true, some days reading my FB news feed (and responding as the mood strikes me) can take a significant chunk of time. Perhaps if I were connected via my phone, it would be different.

4. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. AND Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.

I thought the way the article evaluated the possible positive and negative consequences of digital intimacy to be enlightening. As I’ve stated before, I still have a fear about the lack of human-to-human, face-to-face contact with all these various new means of intimacy. I guess it’s a good thing that people are studying it.

5. People in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared…have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. AND “If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.”

It’s scary to think about other people defining who you are in the absence of your own online presence. It was something that has happened in the past to me (don’t want to get into it in a public forum), and in some ways, it’s a concern I have as a teacher. I don’t expect all my students to love me, but I don’t like for their complaints to have a wider audience than their close circle of friends or family.

On “identity –constraining”” I went to a high school where only 3 of my earlier classmates attended. Then, I went to college out of state with no one I knew. I’ve moved three times since then. All opportunities to reinvent myself. Sometimes, this was a good thing. I needed or wanted to move forward.

Yeah, back accessing this site.

I guess it's good to have it happen to me so I can imagine what it would be like for kids, but I'm having a heck of a time with maintaining my access to this site. The best I can tell from the millions of "help" files I've been reading is that it has to do with my security settings, but so far changing things hasn't helped my laptop. At least my dinosaur desktop is more cooperative.

Ah, Jeff, they need you at SMU (but DON'T leave!)

I was checking facebook and had a news feed posting (terminology?) from NCTE about this article. Of course, any article that encourages teaching naked: 1. piques my interest and 2. makes me very happy to be a verbal not a visual person.

Having listened to Dr. Pelligrino's presentation last week (was it only a week ago?), nothing in the article is surprising. Did he not decry the same boring PPt lectures? Still, it was validation to read the struggle from another learned person's POV. I also enjoyed the comments at the end.

Twitter lawsuit - really?

I expect by now you've all heard of the lawsuit wrangling surrounding twitter, Horizon Realty, and an apartment tenant. If not, here is one source for some details. I like it as a teachable moment and good fodder for discussion of where is the line between expressing one's opinion and slander.

Gotta Love the Irony

About Battle for Facebook

You have to love all the irony in this story, whatever the truth is about the founding of Facebook.

Quotes to prove that point:

One of the world's most popular networking tool was launched by a brilliant but ostracized nerd sitting alone in a dorm room. (Almost archetypal underdog story?)

They didn't care about money. They cared about code. (All the lawsuits are just about who gets to be the correct answer to the trivia question, “Who invented Facebook?” Yeah.)

Zuckerberg found himself ….just another face in the crowd. (Try searching a common name on Facebook...)

Despite his virtuoso ability at coding, Zuckerberg didn't choose to study computer science. Instead, he majored in psychology. (Smart move, I'd say. Why study what he already knew?)

The guy who first created an online facebook for Harvard couldn't even get a job at Facebook. (Well, his track record wasn't very good.)

The student who had once been threatened with expulsion for posting pirated photos of fellow students had succeeded in altering Harvard's entire culture. (Actually, why haven't we learned after all these years of watching people who are unsuccessful in school becoming wildly successful, inventive, revolutionary in life...)

On his Facebook page, Tyler Winklevoss has written that he is about to settle the lawsuit against Zuckerberg,… (my favorite)

Building Books Online

On Karen M.'s recommendation, I visited and explored the UDL Book Builder site. What was most interesting or helpful to me were the Model Books. Since it initially appeared as if the primary target was elementary students, I wondered about applications for the high school level. The models for high school level were all in the "models created by teachers" section. I particularly liked A Depression So Great, A Young Father Reflects, and Adolescent Sleep Times and Academic Performance. Notice that I didn't even get out of the A's before I could see many, many applications at the high school level.

Blogging out- Day 4

Sad to have ended on a frustrating note when the day had been so wonderful up to that point. I never did get my MLA to save on a jump drive. Created some huge and un-removable .tmp files in the process as well. Oh to have the wonderful techie resources of KSU at my beck and call. That said, the rest of the day was fun.

Dr. Pellegrino has me wanting to sign up for his class in the spring semester. How depressing is it that at the end of my Masters program I want to return to a class called Intro to Learning? (Doesn't matter. My daughter would kill me - or find some other horrible teenage way to take it out on me. ) I think what made him different from the typical presenters that you get with technology was his clear dedication to not just introducing bells and whistles for the sake of having bells and whistles.

Sadly, enough classrooms in our area (though not in our district) have introduced clickers and not all teachers have used them in pedagogically responsible ways. As a result, some students have begun to resent them as much as the dreaded "take out a piece of paper for a pop quiz." I loved how Dr. Pellegrino showed us ways to use the clickers in ways to ENHANCE the actual depth and breadth of the learning of the students.

Thankfully, it's not an issue I think I'll be worrying about any time soon. My request is still in for an LCD projector.

I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the cocktail party (sometimes if I've used it to introduce a longer piece like a novel, I've called it a pre-premiere party) with "Grandmother Grace". I've even used that same poem in my classroom before, yet I didn't recognize it. Anything that helps create cognitive dissonance is a keeper in my book.

I also enjoyed KAT's co-opting of the classroom to describe cento poetry. I need to remember to look at the formatting in the books you brought if you still have them around tomorrow. Also, since I spent the time I was waiting on my computer to freeze up reading your article, I'd love to see some examples of the Illuminated Poetry. I know last year at Write Here, Write Now, people were raving about your session. I'm sure I could learn much from you about how to integrate more poetry into daily classroom life.

Finding Famous Friends and Family was a fun way to do grouping. You can never have enough ways to put kids in new groups. I use playing cards often myself (group by suit, by color, by number, etc.). The utensil passing activity was so much fun! That type of laughter is something I definitely try to induce in my classroom as much as is productive.

The Ellis Island Simulation made me very uncomfortable, too emotional for me. I don't think kids would necessarily have that same reaction, but I'd have to be prepared to handle some of the potential stereotyping or prejudicial behavior gently and helpfully. I mentioned cognitive dissonance earlier, and I'm experiencing it with this idea. I like that it could lead to great discussion and a wonderful exploration of beliefs, but I'd have to have my class in the right place before I could attempt that exact simulation. Elizabeth or Casey, whoever shared that your student has one that you use, could you - if it's not stealing - provide me/us with a copy of the nuclear fallout simulation.

As far as responding to the music and the art and the sketch-to-stretch, it was not really anything new to me. Does anyone else use QuickWrites? Linda Reif has a book about them with poetry, cartoon, and narrative prompts for SHORT writing moments. I use some of hers, but also try to find resources (art, photograph, news stories, music, ...) that relate to other parts of the content we might be working on that day.

Time to stop and get something to eat. Miles to link before I sleep.

If I mess with it tomorrow, break my fingers!

I'm done. I am so amazed at how much doing the Multigenre Literacy Autobiography has taught me about myself. Forget that it might be an interesting tool for my students to do. It was worth doing just for the realizations I've had into my own development as a reader/writer! (Imagine what I might have learned if I had the time to do it as well as I would have liked - as in with music, etc.) SPOILER ALERT: Here are some of my insights:

1. I was pretty sheltered as a younger child. I don't see that as all bad; for one thing, I had so much time to read!

2. Obviously, print has dominated my life. It was MUCH easier for me to come up with lists of books than any other genre, and I have deeper emotional reactions and a better recall of the details (where the book came from - library, purchase, gift; where I was when I read the book; how I felt about the characters; approximately how many times I read the book; who recommended it/to whom I recommended it), and there are far more books left OUT than any other genre.

3. I really was a victim of the DWEMs prior to college.

4. I read as much, if not more, classic lit in high school as in college. Partly, it was self-motivated.

5. Few, if any, of my Honors students have anywhere NEAR the print experience I had going into high school.

6. At a variety of points, I was surprised at the divergence in my choices. I remember liking the two examples, but they seem mutually exclusive almost. Good thing I never felt pigeonholed, but do I ever make assumptions about students that way?

7. Until late elementary I can't really remember actively rejecting any genre.

8. Thankfully (I've spent too much money and time for this to be otherwise), I teach much differently from how I was taught. I was going to give up near the end, but I decided to look for a couple of photographs. While it was a horrible choice sleep-wise (please excuse my snoring during the guest speaker tomorrow), I felt very good about some of the cool learning activities I actually had EVIDENCE of in my My Pictures folders.

9. My daughter's experience has been so different from mine, but she has had so much more opportunity to create a variety of texts - and not just digitally, also through art, dance, music, and old-fashioned pencil-to-paper.

10. I'm going to be really bummed if I don't get to share this, but I also know that I definitely MUST come up with an abridged version before I show my students. I like it, but it IS a draft!

Good night.

Blogging Out - Day 3

Okay, if this class is theoretically halfway over, I'm in BIG, BIG trouble.



I thoroughly enjoy Gary Mote's presentation today. Like Tom McNeal yesterday, he was so helpful and so knowledgeable and so unassuming about it. I have a feeling, however, that it will be a while before I am able to completely assimilate much of what he showed us today. I was able to download and use DEBUT to do a screen capture to use in my autobiography which was cool. Knowing that SO MUCH information was collected in ONE place is in itself very helpful.

How lucky Kent State is to have such a valuable resource - thank you, Dr. Kist, for knowing about and taking advantage of his expertise. Both you and Dr. Dowdy have modeled well the practice of bringing in expert guest speakers to the classroom (and taking "short" field trips). Sometimes I forget how valuable it can be for the students to hear a variety of voices in learning. The novelty itself can be good, but it's a relief for me not to have to know everything and the students get to make valuable connections.

In some other blogs from this class, there have been questions about the use of PhotoStory, so I am going to try to attach/include/embed/insert correct verb here my little vacation movie. Well, I found a button that makes it easy (it's the "add video" button; imagine that).

Blogging Out - Day 2

I love learning from Dr. Dowdy because she always keeps me off kilter. Even though I have had two classes from her and seen her workshops in a variety of other settings, I always come away with a new insight or a reminder of something I've put on a back shelf for too long. That's how it was this morning. So much can be done with film in the classroom. A couple of thoughts I had in particular during her presentation were:

1. My Honors 10 students struggle with The Odyssey. I like the idea of talking about it as if the text were already a film. So little of the epic is written in "close-up" mode; much more of it is in "long, establishing shots." I wonder if making that distinction - and then maybe doing some scripting or process drama to get at what might have been experienced in the "missing close ups"- would help it come alive.

2. I need to think of using CLIPS more and full movies less. It'll be another thing to make my students crazy, but I'm not saying that I would never use a full movie, but that before I do, I want to do more and more with reading the clips. Two benefits: better critical viewers and an opportunity to introduce them to a greater variety of films.

After that, the time flew by. I enjoyed the circle activities. Definitely ones to add to my list of community building activities. The Singing Syllables activity will be a nice ways to review pronunciation. I'm saddened at how many of my high school students have poor decoding skills for multisyllabic words. This could be a fun way to review - using the excuse that we need to stretch our legs.

I'm avoiding the wiki issue because denial always works for me when I have a big project and I can't decide on a topic. (Making a decision is my goal for tonight.)

The classroom of the future was interesting. A friend of mine has a classroom full of technology similar to that set-up without the research component. She's working her way through it, but there is so much to learn and to integrate. Today it's feeling rather overwhelming.

First Day's Learnings (Top Seven)

7. First class I've attended at Kent where other students come from farther away than I do. I wonder what that says about the appeal of this class, this topic, etc.

6. Surprised to find so many who teach/work with students who seem so very young, but that was just the beginning of the surprises. I keep hearing how it could work, and seeing examples, but I guess my learning curve is steep here. (Is is steep? I struggle with the learning curve metaphor even though I just attempted to use it.)

5. Notwithstanding #9, no other mention in our group of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider"?

4. Easy to see how one could find oneself behind one's computer all day long should one want to know EVERYTHING that is out there. Already today in my brief, brief, brief exploration, I have found people doing and/or thinking about the issues that I am interested in, implementing ideas I've contemplated, etc.

3. (Perhaps KAT can weigh in on this.) I'm finding an odd synchronicity happening with what I'm reading in The Art of Teaching Writing and what Dr. Kist is saying. As I read and think about an idea to explore for TATW (currently: using writers' workshop concepts with my seniors), I've been thinking about how to build community, how to incorporate the freedom of the workshop and yet still address 21st century and world-of-work competencies, ...

2. The hours between 9 and 4 can actually go faster than I've ever known. While I appreciate the variety of activities (thank you, thank you), I'm still already feeling overwhelmed by all that I am learning. How to bring this all together? Grateful for the "think time" that the Aug. 10th reunion encourages. Also, as a high school teacher, I am used to thinking in 41-minute increments. My students already find my instruction disjointed (okay, this post won't get anywhere disproving that idea). What can I do to help them (and myself) see the glue that holds it all together (perhaps the web that connects it all would be a more apt image)?

1. Getting used to my new laptop in a huge hurry. The availability of technology does remain an issue. I am glad it's not all about the technology; specifically, I found Dr. Kist's comment about helping our students get along in a f2f community as a step to being better able to get along in the global community to be insightful. I feel as if that point gets ignored by some people who emphasize the need to think on a global scale and who forget that our students may not even be able to cooperate with the student who sits in the next desk. Again, what is the big picture that brings it all together? What is critical for all students regardless of their affinity for or access to technology?

Blog Exploration #1

An example of how to use it in the classroom, seems very similar to what I would like to do with some of my classes:

http://smith9h0708.blogspot.com/

I am curious about a variety of things that happened in her classroom, such as fishbowls and the Wikified Research project. I guess the next thing to do is to look to see if the teacher has a webpage where I might find these details, or, gasp, I suppose I could actually try to contact her! (OK, figured out that I couldn't figure out how to do that.)

Another neat thing that I found in this blog was the use of a daily scribe, who posted the happenings of the day on the blog each day, including homework.

One of the most interesting things I found in this blog was that the kids seemed to be real and honest and it was even rather scary. I like my teacher evaluations for the information that I get, but having them out there in the world for ANYONE to read. Wow. That takes more courage than I’m sure I could find.

It was great to get to read the students’ entries though because they really seemed to feel free to express their personalities. Also, they were full of the idiosyncrasies of actual student writing (lack of paragraphing being my particular issue).

Class Begins!

During the course of this week and this course, I would like to discover how I can make the digital world (and the larger, non-print world) of my students more a part of my English classes. How can I both tap into and can I help students become more aware of and more adept at using/consuming the variety of texts available in their worlds?

I am excited to see that we will be doing a balance of analog and digital work, some of which is familiar and some of which is going to be more challenging. I look forward to digging in.

Ah...so that's it.

Quoted in The Art of Teaching Writing (Calkins 1994): "Stories happen to those who tell them," Thucydides said.

I've always been in awe of people who are good storytellers and who have such interesting lives. I sit on the sidelines and envy them. The implication of the quote, which I believe to be true, is that I join them by joining them. If I begin looking for and telling the stories in my own life, I will find that mine is also an interesting life.

Hmm...

New Literacies in Action, Ch. 1-4

My favorite lines so far (quoting Marco Torres of SFETT about his "failing school"):

I convinced the parents that test scores are basically based solely for school reputations. They don't do anything to develop human spirit in children. They don't do anything to support educators and make them feel better about the jobs that they do, and, most importantly, kids, especially here in my community, a lot of them have very low self-esteem. So, if I can make them feel good, make them feel special, then the parents feel good, and the parents feel special....That is very rewarding and those little quick victories in their lives, builds will for them to make bigger decisions. (p. 65)

While I am awed and humbled (not the right word - more that he makes me feel inadequate as a teacher) by this man's work, I applaud his vision, the way he "gets" right at what is so important and what is so wrong in our educational system. He's talking about Latino students in urban Southern California, but he describes my nearly-Appalachian rural students precisely.

All the focus on accountability and standardization and the same leaders decry the lack of creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, empathy, and workplace skills in our graduates. Well, duh! How many bubble tests does it take to kill the joy of learning?

New favorite PD title

As it is with everything, the latest becomes the favorite, but rarely have I found an author who so eloquently channels the words I think but haven't spoken or written. The book is Thomas Newkirk's Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For. The six principles include balancing reading and writing instruction, making a place for expressive writing, welcoming pop culture, embracing and sharing the pleasure of reading and writing, simplifying the curriculum, and acknowledging the difficulties of successful teaching. The first couple of chapters outline the history of literacy education and educational testing which have led us to the current morass.